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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 93a9dc7 | But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 506ce41 | Well, that's how thick I am, I never knew how to want what everyone wants. I only thought to look for a home, some place to be taken in. Handing over a crumpled heart, seeing it dropped in the wastepaper basket every time. Here, though. Americans sent love letters in return. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 8790510 | We go to gain a little patch of ground That hath in it no profit but the name. | Acquisition | ||
| cb5b8a8 | What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Asterix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to afficher erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 6ed93d7 | The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salome could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| bf5b9e4 | Because what would be left, when all these books were in the past? He lay awake nights dreading it. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 402fa1f | The real teacher is endurance. | Lawrence Durrell | ||
| 681e2f0 | It was all very well occupying the moral high ground on electoral reform, but what really mattered, she thought, was how you treated your mother. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| fcbd47a | There were three chairs on the verandah--comfortable old wooden chairs that probably dated from Protectorate days. "The British brought chairs," Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni once said. "They took chairs with them wherever they went in the world. And they left the chairs behind when they went home." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c15215d | Problems have a way of solving themselves. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| ecaaab1 | Do you think your dog might have been drunk when he bit these people, Mr Lordie? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 59d7983 | her daddy, as she called him, and of whom she thought at some point every day, every single day, and whom she had loved with all her heart. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 973b397 | we don't see our parents as people. Your daddy was also a man--a very good man too--but he was a man. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2d01d4c | but then where would one end if one started to compose a list of the wrongs that this world had seen? Better perhaps, thought Mma Ramotswe, to make a list of those things that were right with the world, of people who had made life better for other people, or who had done what they had been called to do with honour and without complaint. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d09a482 | She assigned the shirt a number and turned to the next prize. This was a set of six fish knives and forks, made by Hamilton and Inches, and a very handsome prize for somebody. This would be popular at a Conservative function, but would be useless at a Labour Party event. They had no idea, she believed, of the use of fish knives and forks and used the same cutlery for everything. That was part of the problem. The Liberal Democrats, of course.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c6c93ff | you did not look for a winner who would take everything; you found a way of allowing people to save face; you found a way of healing rather than imposing. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8e1ee9d | Animals, like people, did not ask to be who or what they were, and to make life difficult for others simply for being what they were seemed to her to be fundamentally unkind. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9a1d41e | Isabel's private theory of moral proximity, the basis of those obligations that came into existence when we found ourselves close enough to others to be able to witness or feel their needs, or when we were in some other way linked to their plight. We could not deal with all the suffering or need in the world, but we could--and should--deal with that sliver of suffering that was reasonably close to us. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| ddd78a9 | My old friend," he began, "is down below, his face we'll see no more, for what he thought was H2O was H2SO4" | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7653ecb | Because laughs never die away entirely," said Jamie. "At least, if you believe in Marconi." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c850a48 | People's lives are delicate; you cannot interfere with them without running the risk of changing them profoundly. A chance remark, a careless involvement, may make the difference between a life of happiness and one of sorrow. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a5e4b2d | Cattle had no vote, nor the words to express a view, but their feelings ranked above just about everything else in the country. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 0702ff5 | What I said to you was private. We can have private reservations about a person's work, but that doesn't mean to say that we have to spell those out to him. It's called tact, Isabel! | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2ad3eba | Anybody in any employment in Botswana was expected to engage somebody to help in the house. There was nothing extravagant about this; it was, in fact, a form of sharing: if you had a job, you had money, and money needed to be spread around. The people who helped in the house were often paid a pittance and expected to work long hours, but they were desperate for any job and were pleased to take on what came their way. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3e40ca3 | MMA RAMOTSWE observed speed limits for two reasons. One of these was that she believed that laws were there to be obeyed, and that if everybody drove as fast as they liked there would be mayhem on the roads. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c1b1af0 | She could turn away and say that they had nothing to do with her, or she could accept that they had somehow touched her skirt. ...we all had a skirt, and those who touched our skirt became our concern. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 1c64c68 | We all had to say goodbye, sooner or later, to those we loved--or they had to say goodbye to us. Those were the only two possibilities that this world allowed. But no matter how much we tried to face up to it, it never became easier. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d50d9ac | Or would Hell be an endless loop of boy bands or rap? Either would be torture. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| aa44294 | You do not have to read a book to understand how the world works. You just have to keep your eyes open. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8a348d5 | when she had those dreams at night, he was there, as if he had never died, although she knew, even in the dream, that he had. One day she would join him, she knew, whatever people said about how we came to an end when we took our last breath. Some people mocked you if you said that you joined others when your time came. Well, they could laugh, those clever people, but we surely had to hope, and a life without hope of any sort was no life: i.. | hope | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| df4de5d | He is a good, kind man," said Mma Potokwane. "And such men are often too busy. I have noticed that round here too. That man I was talking to just then--one of our groundsmen--he is like that. He is so kind that everybody asks him to do everything. We had a bad-tempered man working here once and he had nothing to do because nobody, apart form myself, of course, had the courage to ask him to do anything." | kind | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 67a559d | We are all human, she would say. Men particularly. You must not be ashamed. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6c434b3 | the names we gave to others, and the things we accused them of, often said more about us than they did about them. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 56b8308 | And he readily admitted that he knew nothing about women's clothing, as most men would have to admit; and yet women always claimed to know what clothes were right for a man. There was some injustice here, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, although he was not quite sure how one might pursue the point. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 1c6458d | Who is happier, those who are aware, and doubt, or those who are sure of what they believe in, and have never doubted or questioned it? The answer, she had concluded, was that this had nothing to do with happiness, which came upon you like the weather, determined by your personlaity. | deep-thoughts happiness personality philosophical-musings philosophy weather | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| ef15366 | Small ones too, Mma Sometimes big problems are really tiny ones when you look at them in the right way. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 53ac544 | I heard him say that he knew that he had been very stupid and that he would not be stupid again. Those were his very words, Mma, and I wrote them down on a piece of paper which we can keep in the office here and take out and wave at him some time in the future if we need to do so. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| aa96f6e | Her friend who treated her maid badly was not a wicked person. She behaved well towards her family and she had always been kind to Mma Ramotswe, but when it came to her maid--and Mma Ramotswe had met this maid, who seemed an agreeable, hardworking woman from Molepolole--she seemed to have little concern for her feelings. It occurred to Mma Ramotswe that such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspi.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9c33481 | there were occasions on which talking about distressing things merely kept those things alive, whereas not talking about them, consigning them to the past, forgetting them, allowed one to think about things that were positive, things that made the world a bit better. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4e1148d | Yes, thought Mma Ramotswe, the world can be very discouraging. But we cannot sit and think about all the things that have gone wrong, or could go wrong. There was no point in doing that...There was much for which we could be grateful, whatever the sorrows of this world. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7051ceb | But if you do not forgive, and you think all the time about getting even, or punishing somebody who has done you a wrong, what are you achieving? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a08da93 | A sleeping partner?" "That's it. I always thought that was an odd expression, Mma. I always thought of a sleeping partner as being somebody who sat with his head on his desk and slept." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 22f2b42 | There are so many people who would love to be able to live in peace, but there are so many others who do not want to let them. Mr. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 46b4516 | It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none. | Alexander McCall Smith |